INHUMANUM: A THRILLER (Law of Retaliation Book 1) Read online

  “Let’s stay on track, Bonn. So you feel powerless?”

  “Actually, I am powerless. I’m a small boy. I’m pretty much stuck with what adults decide for me for another decade.”

  “Do you think the adults in your life are unfair to you?”

  “That’s an interesting question—since my frontal lobe is still undeveloped I’m thankful for any guidance I get. I’m not capable of rational decisions yet, so I don’t worry about what is fair and what isn’t. What could a small child do even if they perceive an ‘unfairness?’ I certainly do enjoy superheroes, though, Mr. Talbot. I’ll tell you why. They exact unfair justice upon unfair people. Let me illustrate. What if it were you, Tom, that watched Lady Godiva gallop through the streets of Coventry in all her naked glory—in order to decrease your taxes? You recall, of course, the reason for her historic ride? It was an act of support for the commoners her husband had too-dearly taxed. Anyhow, if it were ‘Peeping Tom Talbot’ who broke the agreement to avert his eyes and Superman flew in and said: ‘Shame on you, Talbot,’ and fried your eyes with his laser vision, would that be fair?” Tom was dumbstruck. “In my view, it wouldn’t. Superman is bigger, faster, smarter, stronger, better dressed—has a superior intellect, Tom. He’s better than you in every conceivable way. You wouldn’t stand a chance. The more important question is: would it be just? I’ll give you my answer: it would. If you, with your grubby eleventh-century peasant tongue agreed to avert your eyes, then peeked? You lied. That’s on you. That, Tom, is a society I want to live in. The problem arises when the citizens of Coventry lament the fate of the poor liar: ‘But it was just a peek, Superman. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime.’ How naïve. Superman did the only thing that works—you won’t peek again, will you? And since he allowed you to live, you fulfill a greater service to your fellow citizens than if you had politely averted your eyes. You become a beggar—a daily reminder for the people of Coventry that justice must be unfair to work.”

  Tom found his voice, but it didn’t emanate from a stable place. “So S.M. is—”

  “Superman. Yes. Are you certain you still wish to talk about the graphs? I thought we had moved on.”

  “Yes,” Raquel announced, “we’re quite done. Tom? Barbara? Please write your suggestions and thoughts down—I’ll share them with my husband.”

  In the letter from Thomas Talbot, he urged the Maddox family to “seek the help of a psychiatrist.” In Tom’s estimation, “the magical thinking” Bonn used, “could lead to a downward spiral of superstition and behaviors that may harm himself or more likely others.” Troy took Bonn to a psychiatrist. They left with a piece of paper. Raquel handed the paper to the principal on Monday.

  “I strongly suggest B. Maddox skip to fourth grade. B. Maddox tests at AP college level equivalent math—higher still in linguistics. His behavior borders on asocial, however diagnosis is impractical due to child’s advanced use of redirection (of observer.) IQ testing deferred due to a pseudo-philosophical discussion involving the math required to define the word: ‘quotient.’ Aforementioned discussion spurred by B. Maddox. In short—please keep this child challenged. We may all be sorry if he is not. Follow up in six months if re-evaluation is desired.”

  Bonn was moved to Ms. Rothknot’s fourth-grade homeroom. Troy and Raquel tried to find challenges for Bonn. They tried hockey, piano, and golf—all before Bonn finished the fifth grade. Bonn, however, applied hockey rules to his golf game and took the piano apart while his teacher was in the bathroom. He remained polite throughout. Having finished the fifth grade, Bonn could enter Boy Scouts. Technically the minimum age for Boy Scouts was eleven, but exceptions were made for advanced younger boys—especially those with wealthy fathers with successful law practices.

  Troy tired of the scoutmaster’s diatribe. Bonn could see it—whenever Troy said “uh huh” he no longer listened. After all, Troy spoke on the telephone much more often than he spoke to his family. Bonn recognized the cues.

  He had read the Scout handbook in a sitting the night he was accepted. The eight-year-old carried himself with confidence: shoulders back, head high. Older boys assumed he was cocky. They ganged up on him. Bonn didn’t mind, really. He didn’t even fight back for a while. He learned from the beatings—about human nature, about groupthink, and about charisma. It took a dynamic ringleader to convince others to follow him. He also learned about pain. He absorbed pain. He categorized it. He both felt, yet was indifferent to it. More importantly, he learned about those who doled it out—those willing to hurt someone simply because they seemed weak. It spoke to poor reasoning on the part of the persecutor.

  If you didn’t kill someone eventually they would come for you.

  If you didn’t destroy them, you had better disrupt their motivation to seek a fight with you in the future.

  That’s where his tormentors fell short.

  Bonn also had trouble when he decided to use the slide—he had only gone down once—when he was six. Bonn preferred to remember the smooth acceleration in his raw and virgin run. He waited in line for the slide like he should. He didn’t want to wait with the others but knew it was expected. He was bumped and jostled by careless classmates. The boy in front of him paused to tie his shoe when it was his turn to go, so Bonn went up the ladder instead.

  It was the efficient choice. The kids behind them would wait less—everyone benefitted.

  A boy twice his size kicked him in the mouth at the bottom of the slide. “You took cuts. That’s what you get!”

  The blow nearly knocked out his tooth. Bonn faced the laughing bully and tongued the bloody incisor. Then he wiggled the tooth with a finger and snapped the remaining shred of torn dental ligament himself. He held the tooth out to the bully, who turned green. The boy’s knees locked. He reeled for a moment and went down. A circle of children formed. Bonn sat on the bully’s neck and forced his mouth open. When he struggled, Bonn rammed the bully in the diaphragm with his knees and dug his fingers into his trachea. The boy coughed and gasped. Bonn shoved the tooth down his throat like a veterinarian force-feeds a pill to a cat. The boy gagged and swallowed the tooth. Bonn got up and left. The bully sat up.

  A beaming girl in pigtails squatted down to look at him. “Sometime tomorrow Bonn’s gonna bite you in the BUTT-hole, Gulp-tooth.”

  The circle of breathless children shrieked like jungle birds who have spotted a snake. “Gulp-tooth! Gulp-tooth!”

  It was a big win for all girls. Girls were special targets for the bully and the one with pigtails was a hero. It took guts to do what Bonn did, sure—but a nickname like Gulp-tooth? That took away the bully’s power.

  The principal called Raquel to report the event.

  “There was a playground altercation. Your son lost a tooth, but, ma’am, he—well, he forced the other child to swallow the tooth. His actions incited what can only be described as a riot.” Troy locked him in the library. It struck Bonn as a poor choice of punishment, however. He chose to spend his time there anyway.

  At long last, Troy finished the call. “You know what that was about?” Bonn nodded. Troy poured himself four fingers of scotch. He swallowed greedily and sat in a leather chair near a bank of windows facing the gorge. “Didn’t you want to get signed off on your knots?” Bonn didn’t answer. Troy glanced around the library for him. His son stood at the sideboard. He poured himself a scotch.

  That was new. Was the boy looking for limits?

  Troy decided not to redirect Bonn from the decanter.

  The burn from the liquor would teach him.

  Bonn sat in a chair next to his father and held his drink the same way. “A good knot can be untied. I accomplished that.”

  “Yeah, you did. Several times. I’m most interested in why you tied up eight boys.”

  Didn’t he spend enough time with Bonn? Was it a cry for attention? Somehow it didn’t seem so—he had plans to spend time with Bonn. Later. When he was older. The intense little character seemed to be more comfortable alone anyway.


  Troy downed his drink.

  By the time Bonn was twelve or fourteen—old enough to really throw a football, they’d laugh about this.

  Bonn tracked a crow that flew from the gorge. It carried something small and dead. The wind in the trees added a blur of green monochrome. Rain tapped at the windowpane with each gust. Corvids were tough. They barely needed shelter—they just weathered the storm.

  You could hide in a storm, if you were a crow. No one would come to look for you. Maybe he didn’t need to be a crow. Maybe he could stand still in the gorge and not be seen. Maybe everyone would leave him alone. Animals on TV that held still blended in unless they moved.

  Bonn envied crows. He wished he were one.

  He’d sprout wings. He’d carry dead things. Large dead things.

  “A couple of boys tied me into my sleeping bag. I couldn’t breathe. I called for help, but even though they all heard me, no one came.”

  “So how did you get out?”

  “Well, I followed the motto—you know, ‘be prepared.’ I had a knife. I cut my way out.”

  “Ok. That was good thinking. What happened next?”

  “I decided what the right thing to do at the moment was and I did it. It’s all in the handbook.”

  “What did you ‘decide’ to do?”

  “I elbowed one of the kids in the nose. One of the guys who tied me in my bag—when the other kid came at me, I kicked him in the balls, then I tied them up.”

  “What about the other six? Why did you tie them up?”

  “Because they didn’t help me. They let the other two do what they did. So I treated them all the same.”

  “How were you able to overpower six of them at once?”

  “Sheep don’t fight, Dad. They just let me. If someone will stand by and let others be hurt, they will likely allow themselves to be hurt too.”

  “You didn’t tell them you’d ‘cut them’ if they didn’t let you tie them to trees?”

  “Of course I said that, but they didn’t fight.”

  “Would you have cut them if they’d fought?”

  “Of course—but after I cut the first one, the rest would have let me tie them up easily.”

  “How would you have cut him—the first one?”

  “With my knife.”

  “Where Bonn? Where would you have cut him? Where on his body?”

  Bonn looked into the amber fluid in his tumbler. He smelled it next. The silence was uncomfortable for Troy—like knots, Bonn had mastered the pregnant pause. Troy used the engineered silence himself in court, but only when he needed to make someone very uncomfortable. Juries didn’t like the trick, so it had to be used sparingly.

  Silence was a weapon—a damned effective one.

  Bonn raised his glass. “I learned what I needed to learn. Here’s to the Scouts’ handbook—may my victims now read it and avoid the pitfalls of treachery.” He took a big swig from the tumbler and set the glass down on a table. Troy watched for the boy to react to the strong alcohol, but he didn’t. He just looked out the window.

  “You can’t go back to Scouts. You can’t assault a whole group of kids, threaten them, tie innocent ones to trees for crying out loud, and expect to make friends. It isn’t how things are done. It isn’t how the world works.” Bonn sat quietly. “If you want to make friends, you have to play. Visit with the other boys. Make allies. If you want to be normal, you must temper yourself. We all want to do things that are crazy sometimes, but, Bonn, we don’t actually do those things. I don’t know what in the hell you’re thinking.”

  Normal? He didn’t want to be normal. Normal seemed weak. Friends would be nice, but who shared his ideals? No one. No one he knew anyway. He had more in common with the crow than his father.

  The dark bird watched Bonn through the window.

  The crow had ideals. It had sets of rules that it followed and it didn’t take $400.00 bottles of scotch to make the bird happy. Just a scrap of something dead.

  “What makes you happy? Do you want a dog? Do you want to try baseball? What do I need to do to get you to make friends?” Bonn smelled the rain licking the gray stones of the house. He heard it tick on the roof. The angry static from his father seemed like a part of the storm, just another mineral flowing sideways. The crow finished its meal and hopped to the window ledge to avoid the pelting raindrops. The wind changed directions, and the bird leaned into the gale on scaly legs to keep from being blown from the ledge.

  I want a crow.

  “I don’t need friends, but a dog would be nice.” The crow swiveled its head to blink at him—disapprovingly. Something about the bird’s gaze said “turncoat.”

  Troy seemed relieved. He followed his son’s gaze outside. Bonn’s answer had the countenance of today’s harsh weather. Troy boomed with sarcastic levity. “Will you tie the damned thing to a tree?”

  It was another of his courtroom tricks: ask an embarrassing question—in a demeaning way—in which there is only one socially acceptable answer. Bonn pantomimed contemplation, but decided not to answer the way he should.

  “If he is trainable it shouldn’t be necessary.” Troy poured himself another two fingers.

  “Boys want boy dogs!” Troy shouted the anemic attempt to normalize his son, and perhaps to prove that he was paying attention.

  As his father dropped in the ice, the man seemed somehow smaller. Shaken. Uncharacteristically pensive. Bonn tried to guess his thoughts. Was he wondering how he had failed? Concerned that further psychological or personality testing was warranted? Did Troy fleetingly consider summer camp—then dismiss the idea as imprudent based on recent events?

  The phone rang. “Now? Rupert—we didn’t FILE that. Get the district attorney on the phone right now.” Bonn left the library. They were done.

  ~Old Haunts

  Three years passed quickly. Henna no longer had a round, soft face. She was growing—changing—much too fast. It was easy to be proud of Henna. She surprised Alvar daily. Henna’s face felt like her mother’s did at the same age. Henna liked to hear about her mother.

  “I called your mom ‘Nappi’ when she was little.”

  Henna looked up from her project. Alvar’s clothes wore out in odd places. Never the knees, or the seat like her own clothes did, but in parts of his body he used to find his way around, like his shoulders. He bumped his shoulders against parts of the house as points of reference. She sewed patches on his clothes when they became too frayed. It was a rainy day—a good day for sewing.

  “Nappi?”

  The English equivalent was “button.” It was a cute nickname.

  “Yes. She seemed always to have a button in her pocket, or held tightly in her fist. Your grandmother scolded her for taking them, but to Nappi it was part of the game—no matter how cross she became, Nappi would always take another when her mother turned her back.”

  “I like to hear what she was like.”

  “Your mom was always resilient. It was just after World War Two. There weren’t many reasons to play, or to be happy, but she found them. If we didn’t have buttons, she found another game—but I liked the button game the best.”

  “How was it a game?”

  “Well, your grandmother would chase her and—”

  “Do you mind if we call her Lucrece?” Henna frowned at the sewing. “I know we are related, but she wasn’t nice to me. I’d rather call her by her name.”

  “I understand.” Alvar thoughtfully loaded his pipe. “Lucrece would chase Nappi to get back a button. I couldn’t see any of it, of course, but I heard it. Nappi would run by with a button in her fist, feet slapping the floor like mad. Lucrece, I think, didn’t realize she reinforced the behavior by chasing her, or she would never have done it. I couldn’t chase her, but Nappi contrived a way to involve me in the game too. She would busy herself with a book, or some kitchen utensils for a while, until Lucrece became complacent. When she was ready to attack the button jar, she’d pad up to me and whisper something in my ear.” />
  Henna clipped a loose thread from the patch with small scissors. “What did she say?”

  “She said ‘again.’ When Lucrece performed her ablutions, Nappi would make for the buttons. She’d hide one in my shoe, or in my trouser pocket. She never took them for herself. Always for me. When I found one she’d hidden, I’d make a fuss over it. ‘Someone left me a gift!’ I’d exclaim. Nappi would make a happy little trill in the back of her throat and come hug me around the neck.”

  Henna swept little bits of thread from the floor. “She whispered to me sometimes too—little secrets I knew were silly but made me feel special. She talked about you a lot, but she never told me about the buttons.”

  Henna took Mortimer to check for eggs. On the way out she said the dog was turning white on his chin and around his eyes. “His face is gray now, Grandpa. The color of the wolves that pulled Gertie down last winter.” The dog lost an eye and two teeth breaking a window to rout the killers. His remaining fangs pierced the skull of a young male wolf. They’d hung the pelt above the fireplace.

  Alvar replaced Gertie with two cashmere goats. They didn’t give milk, but they were softer to pet and Henna wanted to try her hand spinning wool. Even the farm changed. A trio of black and white Karelian Bear Dogs carved new paths through old pastures and meadows. When they weren’t chasing stoats from the chicken coop, they panted on the porch, waiting for enemies. When the dogs crashed from the porch after a forest animal, their noises disappeared as soon as they hit the forest. It was easy to imagine them floating through the undergrowth, their feet barely grazing the ground. Henna said they preferred to hunt rather than eat what she left them. The sweet potatoes, oatmeal, and even the boiled eggs went largely untouched, but each day when he ran his hands down the flanks of the dogs, Alvar thought they seemed more sleek and muscular than before.

  The little house seemed so quiet without Henna and the eldest, noisy dog. It felt lonesome, though they’d return with eggs soon enough. Without their comforting mammalian noises, his mind looked for old demons. He reflected on his old life in Helsinki—when both Nappi and his blindness were infants. He had just returned from the un-winnable war. It was a time of momentary relief floating in a sea of terror and hunger. Each small hope of survival was gone too soon—a scrap of meat, a bit of bread—the bones in his hips dug into the pallet they slept on. He slowly starved so Nappi and Lucrece could eat. What he did eat, Nappi gave him. The little girl insisted. He heard her stomach growl even when she promised she was full.